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Fickle ice may explain Franklin ghost ship mystery

ABOARD CCGS SIR WILFRID LAURIER—One of the many mysteries of the lost Franklin expedition is the story of a three-masted ghost ship that Inuit hunters saw drifting southward in deadly silence.

Before the last of Sir John Franklin’s 128 men died on their ill-fated mid-19th century mission to navigate the entire Northwest Passage, one of his officers wrote a brief note describing where they had abandoned their ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

They were beset by heavy ice, he wrote, and the expedition had given up trying to break out. And this the ships disappeared into the ether of time. Or so it seemed.

But if Inuit testimony gathered years later is true — and some involved in today’s expedition to find the ships believe it is — then the wrecks of Erebus and Terror are likely hundreds of kilometres away from each other, after being separated by the very ice that doomed them.

“We take it seriously because there’s more than one account of it,” says Marc-André Bernier, manager of underwater archeology at Parks Canada.

“At the same time, you take things with a grain of salt because the Inuit were speaking through interpreters, which adds a level of possibilities for errors. And sometimes they were second-hand accounts, as in, “I heard somebody say that,’ ” says Bernier.

But there is tantalizing hard evidence that Inuit did come in contact with remnants of the Franklin expedition.

Maybe that happened at one of the shipwrecks or maybe at a campsite where the dying crew members fought hunger, disease and the unspeakable cold.

All experts can say for certain is that in the decades after Franklin and his men were officially declared lost in 1848, searchers traded with Inuit for artifacts that the local people claimed originated with the Royal Navy expedition.

Some, like buttons, a gold hat band and silver cutlery, have markings that appear to confirm they came from Franklin’s expedition.

That doesn’t mean Inuit gathered them from a drifting wreck. Franklin’s crew removed huge amounts of belongings and other items from the ships as they abandoned them to the pack ice — baffling amounts, in some experts’ minds — and began hauling these huge loads south in the hope of survival.

The relics may have come from those hoards, gathered by men who some researchers think were going slowly insane, perhaps driven around the bend by scurvy, lead poisoning or simply the suffering brought on by the cold, terminally dark Arctic winter.

However, Inuit interviewed in the 19th century by British and American explorers told of actually boarding a drifting ship and taking things from it.

One of the most intriguing accounts came from Charles Francis Hall, a Vermont newspaper owner turned Arctic explorer, in 1879 — 34 years after the Franklin expedition was last sighted by Europeans.

Hall was told of an Inuit man who encountered a ship adrift while seal hunting near O’Reilly Island. He fought off his fear and climbed aboard.

“At last he ventured to steal a knife, and made off as fast as he could to his home; but on showing the Innuits [sic] what he had stolen, the men of the place all started off to the ship,” Hall wrote.

When they couldn’t find anyone aboard it, “they began ransacking the ship” and broke into a locked cabin, he continued. “They found there a dead man, whose body was very large and heavy, his teeth very long. It took five men to lift this giant kob-lu-na [white man]. He was left where they found him.”

In one area of the ship, so dark the Inuit men had to feel their way around, they found guns “and a great many very good buckets and boxes.” They also discovered tinned meat.

His and other historical accounts are sometimes contradictory and often describe places very difficult to pinpoint today.

But to experts scouring for clues to one of the most perplexing Arctic mysteries, the old stories are among the reasons that searchers began looking for wrecks off the southern part of Victoria Island, where Inuit said the ghost ship had been spotted.

The search area at the northern end of Victoria Strait seems promising because that’s the last known location of Erebus and Terror, reported in an 1848 note written by James Fitzjames, who became captain after Franklin died.

“It’s really like two search expeditions that we’re doing at the same time,” Bernier says. “Each has its challenges because it’s different areas, different environments. One has a lot of reefs and is very shallow. The other is more open water in places.”

He’s been in the Arctic every year since 2002, several of those aboard the Laurier, designated an Arctic Class 2, high-endurance vessel that was built to do more than just break ice — which means it has to steer clear of the heavy stuff.

By observing experts from the Canadian Ice Service, Marriott learned how ice behaves, how to read its intentions from satellite pictures beamed down from an orbit above Earth.

Each day, he pores over the latest images from the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT-2 to get a good look at the ice clogging Victoria Strait, where a flotilla of up to seven vessels is beginning to converge in the search for Erebus and Terror. (Parks Canada is the lead federal agency in the search for the shipwrecks.)

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They don’t have much time, about two weeks if they’re lucky and maybe less if bad weather strikes. Pounding Arctic gales can hit hard and fast this time of the year.

Hunting for shipwrecks is only one of the Laurier’s many tasks. The icebreaker can be called away at any moment for search and rescue, as it has been during previous efforts to find the Franklin wrecks.

And the brutal Arctic winter is near. So heavy ice and a looming storm are the Victoria Strait Expedition’s most pressing problems.

Marriott, ever the optimist when it comes to ice, was actually encouraged by Saturday’s satellite image, even though it showed a creeping monster of ice where the search flotilla is supposed to be working.

A dying wind made him feel good. It had been blowing out of the north, pushing more ice down Victoria and Alexandra Straits.

As this ice gummed up his travel plans, the Laurier’s Capt. Bill Noon has taken to calling its main source — the McClintock Channel — “a big caulking gun.”

The ice it’s spewing stretches from the northern search area down through Victoria Strait to Jenny Lind Island far to the southwest. Some stretches are thin and slushy, others several metres thick and as hard as concrete.

The greatest challenge for ships in the Arctic is the “multi-year ice,” so called because it’s more than a year old.

People who fear global warming find the presence of this ice encouraging: the longer ice lasts without disappearing, the greater their hope that climate change might be slowing.

But then again it might just be a blip in a cycle of good and bad years, a brief pause in warming that is causing the search expedition many headaches.

Two Canadian icebreakers that can smash through at least some of the heavy stuff when they have to are way too far north to help the Victoria Strait Expedition in its race against ice and weather. On Wednesday, at 7:26 p.m., the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent and the CCGS Terry Fox broke through to the North Pole, the first time in 20 years that Canadian icebreakers have reached the top of the world.

In the meantime, winds from the north were driving a thick slab of multi-year ice the size of an island, some 23 nautical miles across. Marriott has been tracking it for days.

He layered Saturday’s satellite image over Friday’s on his computer screen and then clicked on the blending option to show the movement from one day to the next. He saw improvement in the shifting shades of grey and black.

“Now, without the wind, the pressure is starting to be relieved and it’s actually starting to be loose pack all around the southern portion of the northern search area,” he says.

The ice island appears to have stopped drifting, and while Marriott can’t be sure yet, he thinks it may be close enough to shore that it’s locked in place.

But he knows things are never that simple in the Arctic.

Marriott turns to the next computer screen to pull up a weather model. It shows tightening lines of barometric pressure, showing a low pressure cell closing in.

He expects westerlies of up to 25 knots in a few days. They’ll be blowing hard in the worst possible direction for the Franklin searchers, forcing ice east against the area where Erebus and Terror were abandoned.

So Marriott and the crew prefer to think about divine winds, the kind that break up ice and shove it out of their way.

Pessimists aboard the ship may doubt the chances of reaching the northern Victoria Strait search area, but the Ice Whisperer isn’t so worried. He’s seen a lot of it come and go in his time.

“As long as the winds don’t hurt us, we’ll be fine,” he says. “And so far — it’s either luck or experience — it’s turned out that way.”

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